MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION

Week 4: Personality and Values

Shawkat Tanveer Rahman

Senior Lecturer, School of Business
University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh
Learning Objectives

❑ Define personality, describe how it is measured, and explain the

factors that determine an individual’s personality.
❑ Describe the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator personality framework
and assess its strengths and weaknesses.
❑ Identify the key traits in the Big Five personality model and
demonstrate how the traits are relevant to OB.
❑ Define values, demonstrate the importance of values, and contrast
terminal and instrumental values.
❑ Compare the generational differences in values and identify the
dominant values in today’s workforce.
❑ Identify Hofstede’s five value dimensions of national culture.
Secrets of a successful Entrepreneur
A Tale of CEO Mark Josephson of Bitly

❑ Some say it’s a process of elimination—when people find through

trial and error.

❑ Others say success comes from a lengthy process of nurturing

and mentoring.

❑ Still others say it is about having the right stuff—the right

personality.

❑ CEO Mark Josephson of Bitly, the leading Web link shortening

service, would say his success is from all the above: personality,
nurturing/mentoring, and experience.
Personality

❑ The sum total of ways in which an

individual reacts to and interacts with
others

❑ In fact, participants in a recent study

used 624 distinct adjectives to describe
people they knew

❑ Most often described in terms of

measurable traits that a person exhibits, Personality
such as shy, aggressive, submissive, Determinants
lazy, ambitious, loyal and timid • Heredity
• Environment
• Situation
Measuring Personality
❑ Personality assessments have been increasingly used in diverse
organizational settings.

❑ In fact, 80 percent of U.S. private companies and 57 percent of

all large U.S. companies use them.

❑ Ways of measuring personality :

1. Self-reports Surveys
▪ Most common
▪ Prone to error

2. Observer-ratings Surveys
▪ Independent assessment
▪ May be more accurate
Measuring Personality Traits:
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
❑ Most widely used personality-assessment instrument in the world

❑ Individuals are classified as:

Remember: Should not be
• Extroverted or Introverted (E/I)
used as a selection tool
• Sensing or Intuitive (S/N)
because it has not been
• Thinking or Feeling (T/F)
related to job performance!
• Judging or Perceiving (J/P)

❑ The MBTI describes personality types by identifying one trait from each of the
four pairs

❑ Classifications combined into 16 personality types (i.e. INTJ or ESTJ)

❑ For example, Introverted/Intuitive/Thinking/Judging people (INTJs) are

visionaries with original minds and great drive.
Measuring Personality Traits:
The Big-Five Model
❑ The MBTI may lack strong supporting evidence, but an impressive body of
research supports the Big Five Model which proposes that five basic
dimensions underlie all others and encompass most of the significant
variation in human personality.

❑ Five Traits:
• Extraversion- Capture our comfort level with relationships.
• Agreeableness - Addresses the range of interests and fascination with
novelty
• Conscientiousness - A measure of reliability.
• Emotional Stability - Taps a person’s ability to withstand stress
• Openness to Experience - imagination, sensitivity, and curiosity
How Do the Big five traits predict Behavior at Work?

Traits at Workplace Impact on workplace

Conscientiousness • Important for success across many jobs
• Develop higher levels of job knowledge, probably because highly conscientious people learn
more, which in turn, improves job performance (even with abusive supervision)
Emotional Stability • Emotional stability is most strongly related to life satisfaction, job satisfaction, and low stress
levels.
• People with high emotional stability can adapt to unexpected or changing demands in the
workplace
Extraversion • Extraverts (are take charge type of people) perform better in jobs with significant
inter-personal interaction,
• Often emerges as a leader in a group.
Openness • Open people are more likely to be effective leaders—and more comfortable with ambiguity,
Cope better with organizational change and are more adaptable
• Experience less work-family conflict
Agreeableness • Better liked than disagreeable people
• Tend to do better in interpersonally-oriented jobs such as customer service.
• More compliant and rule abiding, less likely to get into accidents, and more satisfied in their
jobs.
Other Personality Attributes Relevant to OB

Core Self-evaluations (CSEs)

❑ Bottom-line conclusions individuals have about their capabilities, competence,

and worth as a person.

❑ People with Positive CSEs -

• Like themselves and see themselves as effective and in control of their
environment.
• Perform better than others because they set more ambitious goals, are
more committed to their goals, and persist longer in attempting to reach
them.
• Provide better customer service, are more popular coworkers, and may
have careers that begin on better footing and ascend more rapidly over
time

What about people with Low- CSEs?

Other Personality Attributes Relevant to OB
Self-Monitoring
❑ Describes an individual’s ability to adjust behavior to external, situational factor

❑ High self-monitors-
• Show considerable adaptability in adjusting their behavior to external
situational factors.
• Highly sensitive to external cues and can behave differently in varying
situations
• Show less commitment to their organizations, but receive better
performance ratings and are more likely to emerge as leaders
• Tend to be more mobile in their careers, receive more promotions, and
are more likely to occupy central positions in organizations.

❑ Low self-monitors- What about people with Low- self-monitors?

• tend to display their true dispositions and attitudes in every situation
• high behavioral consistency between who they are and what they do
Other Personality Attributes Relevant to OB

Proactive personality
❑ Identify opportunities, show initiative, take action, and persevere until
meaningful change occurs.

❑ Proactive individuals have-

• Higher levels of job performance and do not need much oversight.
• Receptive to changes in job demands and thrive when they can
informally tailor their jobs to their strengths.
• More likely to exchange information with others in a team, which
builds trust relationships.

❑ Proactive personality may be important for work teams - 95 R&D teams in 33

Chinese companies revealed that teams with high-average levels of proactive
personality were more innovative.
Values

❑ Represent basic, enduring convictions that "a specific mode of

conduct or end-state of existence is personally or socially
preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or
end-state of existence”.

❑ Represent a prioritizing of individual values by:

• Content – importance to the individual
• Intensity – relative importance with
other values

❑ Values are formed in our early years—by parents, teachers,

friends, and others

❑ Values are the foundation for attitudes, motivation, and behavior

Rokeach Value Survey
❑ Terminal values refers to ❑ Some examples of terminal values
desirable end-states of are prosperity and economic
existence success, freedom, health and
well-being.
❑ Goals that a person would
like to achieve during his or
her lifetime

❑ Instrumental values refers ❑ Examples of instrumental values are

to preferable modes of autonomy and self-reliance, personal
behavior, or means of discipline, kindness, and
achieving the terminal values goal-orientation.
Generational Values (Contemporary Work Cohorts)
Cultural Values
❑ More diverse work-place than before
❑ Values differ across cultures
▪ Two frameworks for assessing culture:
✔ Hofstede
✔ GLOBE

Hofstede’s Framework
for Assessing Cultures
Implications for Managers

Personality:
❑ Evaluate the job, group, and
organization to determine the best fit
❑ Big Five is best to use for selection
❑ MBTI for development and training

Values:
❑ Strongly influence attitudes,
behaviors, and perceptions
❑ Match the individual values to
organizational culture